Tran­script of Radio Show: A Deep­er View — Plu­to and the USA Mercury

What I would like to do today is pick up on things I have been talk­ing about for some time. As I did last week, I will talk about these peri­ods and moments in his­to­ry or in the world’s unfold­ing of events, and that there are plan­e­tary cycles with­in cycles. We look prin­ci­pal­ly at the main dri­vers of large and long range cycles, and they are held by the three out­er plan­ets: Plu­to going through Capri­corn from 2008 to 2024; and Nep­tune going through Pisces from 2011 to 2026; and Uranus going through Tau­rus from 2018 to 2026.

All these are quite potent, pow­er­ful forces and have inter­est­ing inter­sec­tions with oth­er his­tor­i­cal peri­ods that I men­tioned last time and with what’s hap­pen­ing now, and you can always lis­ten to that show if you want to hear that or read the tran­script, or find more on the blog about this stuff as well.

I thought today, though I will always keep in mind these uni­ver­sal ener­gies that are affect­ing the plan­et, we are also affect­ed in indi­vid­ual ways. You can also look at a chart of any enti­ty whether it be a com­pa­ny or a leader of a coun­try or a coun­try itself, you can look at their birth chart and get some indi­ca­tion as to what that coun­try or enti­ty may be going through.

Mun­dane Astrology
This kind of astrol­o­gy is called Mun­dane Astrol­o­gy or world­ly astrol­o­gy, not look­ing at humans or humans and their pets and oth­er kinds of things, but look­ing at look­ing at these larg­er enti­ties formed and often last­ing for many more years than a human. We look at these same ener­gies mov­ing through their charts to see what it might indicate.

Plu­to & Mer­cury in USA Chart
What I men­tioned in the last year or two, build­ing up in the USA chart, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant aspect that is occur­ring this year. These long-wave aspects build in like a Bell curve, com­ing as a wax­ing of ener­gies that reach their cli­max at the most exact moments. This year in the USA, we are expe­ri­enc­ing this triple pass of Plu­to going back and forth over the USA Mer­cury. The exact time, not that it mat­ters for our pur­pos­es, is the end of Feb­ru­ary the mid­dle of July and the begin­ning of 2021.

We would expect this ener­gy to hold steadi­ly, since Plu­to hard­ly moves at all dur­ing the year. What is strik­ing about this align­ment is that this same aspect exists in the USA chart. The Unit­ed States was born with the plan­et Plu­to ris­ing in its Sec­ond House of resources and val­ue, (and the val­ue of any­thing is shown by the 2nd house). Where­as in the 8th house, Mer­cury is locat­ed and is oppo­site to Plu­to, (and the 8^th house rules how we join our val­ues togeth­er and com­bine our assets and resources, to do what we can­not do alone). In a Nation­al chart or a mun­dane chart, the 8^th would include things like inter­na­tion­al affairs and inter­na­tion­al trade and inter­na­tion­al finance and activ­i­ties that we are doing not by our­selves but in com­bi­na­tion with oth­ers. For a nation that means with oth­er enti­ties or nations for the most part and how we com­bine with them, and so this very much deals with our under­stand­ing of our own val­ue and wealth and our trade and wealth with oth­er nations and things of that nature.

But more espe­cial­ly, on anoth­er lev­el, Plu­to deals with, as I’ve been talk­ing about, the will and willpow­er. The cen­tral con­cern of Plu­to is to help us as indi­vid­u­als, or any enti­ty, to form and cre­ate its own sacred space that it exists and abides with­in; and, to turn that ener­gy back on itself in order to achieve greater self-mas­tery and self-deter­mi­na­tion. But often these ener­gies are mis­ap­plied and mis­used by those who live in fear or with a more neg­a­tive view­point, and then they will try to use this ener­gy-form to con­trol or vio­late the spaces of oth­ers, which is why we often have “hell on earth”.

Pluto/Mercury Aspect in USA chart
So, in this regard, this is what is hap­pen­ing with­in the USA chart and its rela­tion­ship to the plan­et Mer­cury, which is the plan­et that rules com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the mind, and thought forms. So, this shows a very intense ener­gy form at the out­set of the USA’s con­sti­tu­tion and struc­ture to do with com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and the pas­sion­ate belief we would have in our thought-forms, ideas, and beliefs.

It is some­what quite well known in many cir­cles that Amer­i­cans can be a lit­tle off putting because we think we are right, all the time. We think our way is the best way and the only way; and that is where we make a mis­take. We do have great ideals and great aspi­ra­tions, to be this great exper­i­ment where all peo­ples come togeth­er and blend togeth­er. But then we our­selves can fall into dog­ma­tism and rigid­i­ty in our own think­ing when we press the case for being all know­ing or hav­ing the only answer, which is not true.

Yet, because Plu­to rules trans­for­ma­tion, rebirth and renew­al and Mer­cury brings the mind to bear, this pow­er that the USA does pos­sess is one that is very direct­ly tied to our pow­er in terms of delv­ing deep­er than oth­er peo­ples might do to under­cov­er under­ly­ing truth. That is why this coun­try has always excelled in terms of research and trans­for­ma­tion­al knowl­edge. I would say that with Plu­to ris­ing and Mer­cury oppo­site in our 8th house, and the fact that Plu­to rules the 8th sign of Scor­pio, I would say the USA is a very “Alchem­i­cal Country”.

Alche­my
What does that mean? Alche­my, like our mod­ern term of chem­istry, is how every­thing is made and cre­at­ed through com­bin­ing with oth­er things. Noth­ing exists by itself; every­thing is a com­bi­na­tion with some­thing else to make some­thing greater. And, in that process we elic­it growth and change and the unfold­ment of the entire cos­mos, (as in atoms devel­op­ing into larg­er atoms, and mol­e­cules devel­op­ing into larg­er mol­e­cules, and life­forms devel­op­ing and mul­ti­ply­ing, all through com­bi­na­tions and elic­i­ta­tions of growth and change). So, this is the very pow­er that dri­ves life itself. It is quite fun­da­men­tal, and one could say that in our coun­try we are dis­cov­er­ing the secrets of life (and oth­er coun­tries are as well), which is very amaz­ing (and scary).

But still, what does it mean for us now as a nation to be deal­ing with this Plu­to tran­sit over Mer­cury, what might it tell us? Well it is mak­ing us reex­am­ine, (as Plu­to march­es through our sec­ond house and lines up with Mer­cury), and deal with this ques­tion of our sacred space and each per­son­’s con­scious­ness; and it reminds us that we may mis­use that pow­er if we are not care­ful, when we try to force ideas upon one anoth­er, or one group to anoth­er, so that peo­ple become obsessed with their think­ing and nar­rowed in their under­stand­ing. Then, rather than hold­ing truth and delv­ing to a greater truth through humil­i­ty and open­ness to a greater under­stand­ing, we end up try­ing to beat each oth­er up with our points of view and “truth”, which is cer­tain­ly hap­pen­ing out there in all dif­fer­ent forms and medi­ums in our world right now.

What hap­pens is that nobody is lis­ten­ing, and every­body is shout­ing at one anoth­er, and we do not find the truth because it gets drowned out in all this noise. So, there is a need for all of us to step back as indi­vid­u­als and take con­trol of our own minds; we need to see how our thoughts and ideas are being swayed and pushed by forces bend­ing them beyond our under­stand­ing. And this holds true not just for thoughts but also for our val­ues, because this is the House of the USA val­ues. Of course we all know and have heard about how our tastes and long­ings, our fears and our hopes, are being shaped by oth­ers who are gath­er­ing all this data on us, and they are learn­ing how to shape our own thoughts and aspi­ra­tions and desires and buy­ing habits, they are shap­ing our val­ues through algo­rithms and all this big data.

Val­ue of a Nation
And again, that is what I would want us to con­sid­er, that if the 2nd house is the House of Val­ue: what is the val­ue of a nation? I’ve talked about this many times, and many peo­ple would con­sid­er in a tra­di­tion­al house chart of a nation, that it is that country’s stocks and bonds, and oil and coal and gas, and all the nat­ur­al resources, and that is the wealth and pros­per­i­ty of that nation. And though I would grant, that on a phys­i­cal lev­el there are phys­i­cal facts that can make one nation have more of these so-called “nat­ur­al resources” than anoth­er. But what I would pre­fer to focus upon, giv­en that we’re deal­ing with humans, and look­ing at things spir­i­tu­al­ly, is that the real source of val­ue of course in any­thing is Spirit.

And there­fore, the val­ues of a nation would then come from its peo­ple, in terms of deal­ing with the human con­di­tion. There­fore we would look at this type of hier­ar­chy of val­ues in terms of our expe­ri­ence of one anoth­er as human, and how we work towards bring­ing out the val­ue and self-worth and lead­ing to the self-ful­fill­ment of every per­son in this nation (of course even in this world) in order to reach the high­est lev­el of a cul­ture and an expe­ri­ence for one and all.

So, these nat­ur­al resources can have val­ue, cer­tain­ly. And what is of val­ue to any cul­ture can change. Obvi­ous­ly, if you are in a cer­tain kind of agrar­i­an cul­ture cer­tain things are use­ful to you. But if you are in a very indus­tri­al kind of cul­ture oth­er things that look like they were use­less now take on great val­ue, like min­er­als and such. So, it varies our expe­ri­ence of the val­ues of this world around us, but our fun­da­men­tal val­ue, the source of val­ue, is the val­ue we have for and between one another.

And so, this is what is going through a trans­for­ma­tion right now as we address this ques­tion of how we work this notion of val­ue in our life. We real­ize that indeed, though we saw humans hav­ing val­ue by the sweat of their labor, and com­bin­ing with var­i­ous resources they were able to pro­duce added val­ue through that effort, (and some were then able to accu­mu­late that val­ue to build larg­er orga­ni­za­tions and insti­tu­tions of value).

Com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of Humans
What is our val­ue, what is your val­ue, in this Amer­i­can econ­o­my? We have come to real­ize this: We are the prod­uct now! There is a whole indus­try devot­ed to exam­in­ing us, to col­lect­ing our “data”, in order to fig­ure out our wants and desires, our fears and long­ings, through all these algo­rithms, so that they can “sell us”. We are what they are sell­ing to others.

So, we have to say: “wait a minute, what is my val­ue and why are you using it in this fash­ion to dri­ve our expe­ri­ences and make us go in this direc­tion ver­sus that direc­tion?” This is a call­ing for all of us to think about how we hold sacred our val­ue and wish to pro­tect our pri­va­cy to what­ev­er extent we wish, and open in oth­er ways to every extent we wish, because these ques­tions have not been addressed but need to be addressed at this time. Because oth­ers may be abus­ing us as a val­ue, and that they seem­ing­ly can own us, and slice up and dice up this infor­ma­tion and share with oth­ers for mon­e­tary gain.

Those are some things that are sort of swirling in my mind about this ques­tion of val­ue for our country.

His­to­ry of Pluto/Mercury Tran­sits in USA Chart
But again, what is also inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly is to look at oth­er points in his­to­ry in which Plu­to made this align­ment to Mer­cury. And, as I have men­tioned before, there were two such times. The pre­vi­ous two align­ments of Plu­to to Mer­cury was 1933 to 1937, and 1981 to 1983.

1930s
And so, I said to myself well let us com­pare those peri­ods and see what hap­pened at each of those moments. Well, obvi­ous­ly in the ear­ly 1930s, it was the begin­ning of the Great Depres­sion, the world came almost to a com­plete stop, and Amer­i­ca was tee­ter­ing at that moment between going one way and anoth­er. Some oth­er solu­tions through­out the world at that time was a fusion of cap­i­tal­ism and the state in terms of Fas­cism; and some went oth­er way towards a fusion of the state and the econ­o­my with Social­ism and Communism.

Amer­i­ca sort of found a way through, not doing one or the oth­er but try­ing to hold togeth­er you might say the labor move­ment and the cap­i­tal­ists and forge an agree­ment of how we would share the ben­e­fits and pro­tect peo­ple but also allow for rea­son­able growth. And there was a mod­el set in place then in the 1930s into the late 1930s that held until the late 1970s. And if we look at the eco­nom­ic mod­el­ing of that, and how the wealth was shared in our econ­o­my from the late 1940s, let’s say from late 40s after the war on up to 1980, the lines of dif­fer­ent income seg­ments in both the bot­tom per­centiles that the top per­centiles went in step with each oth­er, steadi­ly climb­ing so that pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and the gains and the wealth was being dis­trib­uted more or less fair­ly among the dif­fer­ent sec­tors. One could argue how fair, but fair­ly equitable.

1980s
But when we get to 1980 the lines com­plete­ly diverge. And I said to myself, “isn’t that strik­ing, that we were hav­ing this increas­ing­ly grow­ing but fair econ­o­my that broke down, what changed?” What changed in 1980 was the so-called Rea­gan Rev­o­lu­tion, where we cut the mar­gin­al rates of tax­es dra­mat­i­cal­ly; we were promised by cut­ting tax­es we would have extra­or­di­nary growth. George Bush the senior at that time, run­ning against Rea­gan for pres­i­den­tial office, said it is “voodoo eco­nom­ics”. He was right, because the promis­es of great growth pay­ing for the tax cuts and every­body would be made whole, every­body would ben­e­fit from this, did not pan out and for the next 40 years, from 1980 to now 2020, these lines have been diverg­ing. And the major­i­ty of peo­ple have had their incomes flat­ten­ing out, and their wealth decrease. And many of them were wiped out in 2008 when econ­o­my was crashed again by the finan­cial “titans” who sup­pos­ed­ly run these things; they broke the eco­nom­ic machine and it was nev­er fixed or made whole.

From 1980 to 2020, we have been expe­ri­enc­ing a grow­ing unfair shar­ing of our wealth that we all pro­duce. In fact in terms of the share of total US income held by the top 1%, it reached its high­est pro­por­tion right before the great crash in 1929, it got to its low­est lev­el and fairest dis­tri­b­u­tion of US income was reached in the late 70s, and ever since then it’s been climbing.

Inequal­i­ty in America
So this is part of what’s dri­ving our divi­sions now, (there are many oth­er changes that took place in terms of eco­nom­ic laws being changed, not just mar­gin­al tax rates, in terms of how invest­ment banks oper­at­ed, how dif­fer­ent things were hap­pen­ing in the econ­o­my) that led to a skew­ing of out­comes. But one fun­da­men­tal fact is, that unlike oth­er advanced indus­tri­al coun­tries, we changed our tax struc­ture in a dra­mat­ic way that dis­al­lowed the gen­er­al shar­ing of wealth in this coun­try and skewed it to the top 1%, to the top .1%, even the top 5%, and so the rest of us were left to strug­gle more and more to make ends meet.

And so, what is hap­pen­ing here in 2020 is we are going to have this con­ver­sa­tion again about what is right. We should be look­ing at what hap­pened in the 1930s and com­pare it to what hap­pened the 1980s and see where we are now in the 2020s and say, “can we do bet­ter than this, how can we do bet­ter than this”?

This is part of the con­ver­sa­tion that is cer­tain­ly hap­pen­ing in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic side; it should be hap­pen­ing on the Repub­li­can side too, because if these increas­ing divides con­tin­ue this coun­try can­not be held togeth­er and we will divide up and fight one anoth­er or it will be imposed upon us, and we should agree to agree as to what is fair.

That is cer­tain­ly an espe­cial­ly impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion, that will be the con­ver­sa­tion here, as the 2020s begin. Just like we had this same reset eco­nom­i­cal­ly in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, count on there being a major reset of US under­stand­ing and rela­tion­ship to how we han­dle our wealth and val­ue, how there­fore we treat our peo­ple in this upcom­ing period.

Sat­urn and Pluto 
What is also strik­ing about this to my mind, is that at the same time that Plu­to is going over our Mer­cury, Sat­urn now every 29 years comes around the solar sys­tem, that’s how long it takes to make a com­plete cir­cuit of the solar sys­tem,  and this is the year that it’s once again lin­ing up with the USA Plu­to. The very plan­et we have been talk­ing about. Sat­urn lin­ing up a Plu­to is deal­ing with ques­tions posed by Sat­urn which is about ques­tions of author­i­ty, and how we struc­ture things in terms of, in this case, state orga­ni­za­tions or busi­ness orga­ni­za­tions or what­ev­er orga­ni­za­tion we are talk­ing about.

Sat­urn is in a sense the ruler and the leader, and the insti­tu­tion itself, the struc­ture of author­i­ty; and Plu­to is the issue of the will. So how does that author­i­ty wield the will that is put at its dis­pos­al. Again, I always say the will is this ener­gy that we have cre­at­ed by hold­ing our­selves with­in a con­tain­er and then direct that ener­gy out­ward to serve that enti­ty, and as long as whether you’re the head of a fam­i­ly, or the head of a com­mu­ni­ty, or the head of a com­pa­ny or coun­try, as long as you serve the ends of that enti­ty then you are safe and can wield that pow­er correctly.

But when you seize it for your own use or mis­use that author­i­ty, that is when you are brought down. What is hap­pen­ing here with Sat­urn going over the USA Plu­to is that we are deal­ing with this issue of how author­i­ties are wield­ing their will appro­pri­ate­ly, nei­ther over or under doing that, or are they in need of being restruc­tured because they have abused that author­i­ty, because the struc­ture or author­i­ties have let us down, which is cer­tain­ly a big com­plaint of late.

His­to­ry of Sat­urn Con­junct Pluto
So, in look­ing at the times that this hap­pened before it will be about every 29 years, the years that come out are strik­ing. It is 1932, that was when Roo­sevelt comes into office to try to heal the coun­try and move it on a path of good growth again, which took quite some time. 1961, when Kennedy came in and brought about cer­tain reforms and changes that that were fore­short­ened by his assas­si­na­tion. 1991, we go from the years of Rea­gan and Bush to the years of Bill Clin­ton. And now, it is hap­pen­ing again in 2020.

Each one seems to be a piv­otal moment in the rela­tion­ship between pow­er and the author­i­ty, between the state and how it wields its pow­er. So, there is a great strug­gle over who will wield pow­er and how pow­er should be exer­cised in our coun­try from the local lev­el to the state lev­el to the nation­al lev­el. In each peri­od, we had to address these ques­tions of how we wield author­i­ty and pow­er: Are the author­i­ties wield­ing it cor­rect­ly, have they done right by their office? These were the ques­tions in the ear­ly 1930s and the ear­ly 1960s and the ear­ly 1990s. In 2020, these very same ques­tions regard­ing the will and the author­i­ty con­front our coun­try once again.